The Revenant is unthinkingly, aggressively masculine

The Revenant will make you wish that we didn't have an awards season. We've all heard by now that it was very cold during shooting and that the accommodation probably didn't have multiple speeds on the Jacuzzi or more than four gluten-free options. We all know that DiCaprio doesn't have an Oscar yet despite several performances that thoroughly deserved it and a few that didn't but grabbed at it anyway. But that's all irrelevant, because on its own merits this film deserves your time.

There's a very pure piece of filmmaking at its heart, an experimental desire to test the boundaries of shooting in the modern age. With very high-tech cameras and some gorgeous, invisible CG (don't let anyone tell you this film is CG-free), this has the same technical mastery as genius cinematographer Emmanuel

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'Chivo' Lubezki's work on Gravity. But with daring director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu determined to use real locations and natural light only, it's also the sort of grand old filmmaking that few films dare attempt. And that's worth cheering far beyond the Academy's interests and regardless of what happens in the Kodak Theatre at the end of February. The Revenant's importance lies in its beauty, and ugliness, and everything inbetween.

We open with a magical shot of water flowing through a flooded forest - not the last time that this film will remind you of Terrence Malick. The camera pans up to eventually reveal woodsman Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) and his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), stalking a moose as part of a fur-trapping expedition far into the wilderness. But a gunshot behind them alerts the pair to an attack by a hostile tribe on their camp, and they rush back to find themselves in the midst of a bloody battle. In a spinning, breathtaking, apparently unbroken shot (Lubezki showing why he won two consecutive Oscars and might manage a hattrick) the camera passes from killer to victim to killer again through the chaos. And then there is a sudden quiet, with the survivors on their way downriver and their plans in tatters.

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After that comes the premise you have probably heard about.

While scouting the route ahead, Glass is horribly mauled by a bear (just mauled; it's a mama bear). Compassionate but nervous leader Captain Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) leaves him to the doubtful mercies of the gruff, hostile John Fitzgerald (a mumbling Tom Hardy) and the cowed, sensitive Bridger (an excellent Will Poulter). After those two abandon him to die alone, Glass hauls himself back through the wilderness, past the hostile Arikara warriors (who are still tracking his party) and towards an ill-defined revenge on those who wronged him.

It's stripped back, elemental stuff, but amid towering scenery and under cold, clear skies the scale of Glass' ordeal is made horrifyingly clear. Crawling, shuffling and stumbling forward, occasionally swept along rivers that will make you shiver just to look at them, this is very near torture porn at times, or would be if Glass showed even a shiver of deviation from his pursuit. But even in a few moments of joy - a brief connection with a friendly Pawnee (Arthur Redcloud), for instance - he remains a driven man.

The film could hardly be more unthinkingly, aggressively masculine - barely a word is spoken by the few women who appear - and high levels of gore mean that it's not for the faint of heart.

But if you can stomach a little raw bison liver and ignore a deluge of irrelevant Oscar hype, this is a wilderness expedition worth taking.